


cut out the woman in you with a jackknife (god save the sweetness of your iron heart)

by coldhope



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Gen, Hiding Medical Issues, Hurt/Comfort, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 08:27:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20991848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldhope/pseuds/coldhope
Summary: Thomas Barrow is notoftenin the position of needing to be rescued, but when he is, rescue surprises him every time.An exploration into the thoughts of some of the people who have given him their support over the years, despite his concerted efforts to be as disagreeable as possible: Mrs. Hughes and Mr. Bates, and Phyllis Baxter, possibly the first person in the world he has ever simplyasked for helpwhen he badly needed it. What really happened to him during the "treatment" he underwent in London, and what other tolls did it take?





	cut out the woman in you with a jackknife (god save the sweetness of your iron heart)

**Author's Note:**

> I loved these scenes so _much_ that I wanted to do a deeper dive into what was going on inside their heads. Dialogue is verbatim from the show, or as close as I could get it.

_ Cut out the woman in you with a jackknife. God save the sweetness of your iron heart.  _

\-- _ Mervyn Peake _

I

It’s bitter cold, the rain spattering against the high kitchen windows like hail, and Mrs. Hughes shivers as she hurries down the hall to close the back door which  _ someone _ has unaccountably left slightly open -- and stops, her chatelaine’s jingling silenced under the sound of the rain and the dim, miserable, nearby sound of someone trying not to cry. 

She has heard that sound God only knows how many times over the course of her life in service, but generally the person concerned has been a housemaid. This does not sound like a housemaid. 

Mrs. Hughes slips out of the door, arms wrapped around herself against the wet chill of the night, and cannot tell whether or not she is surprised to find Thomas Barrow hunched in a knot against the wall, hair hanging in his face, making small choked sounds. Going about the way he does, always balancing on the knife-edge of unforgivability, skating past danger on the narrowest of margins and relying on other people’s slowness to catch up, it is not entirely shocking that he should have come to grief sooner rather than later, but -- he looks  _ so  _ miserable, and it is so  _ very _ cold outside. 

“Mr. Barrow?” she asks, and it hurts her heart to see the way he flinches, struggles to his feet,  _ guilty _ of being discovered. “What in heaven’s name are you doing out here? I know you’re leaving, but things can’t be as black as all that. You’re trained now. You can apply for a position as a butler.” 

He won’t look at her, black hair hanging in his face, the color of wet paper. He has his hat twisted in his hands, the half-glove on the left one only slightly paler than his skin. It has to be hurting him, how tightly he is holding it. “You don’t know everything, then,” he says after a moment, his accent heavier than usual with the tears, his breathing coming in little juddering gasps.  _ Everything, _ as if she is supposed to be some kind of all-seeing eye of the downstairs kingdom, which she is not: Carson is the one who can see through doors and round corners to root out untidiness and iniquity wherever it may sprout.

Thomas is shivering in long helpless waves, like combers rolling onto a beach. She cannot be having with this. “Then will you tell me everything?” she asks.

He still won’t look up, giving his hat a vicious twist, and catches his breath in a ragged sob. “Look, I’m afraid if I do, Mrs. Hughes, that...that it will shock and disgust you.”

Despite herself she can’t help the edges of a wry smile: the all-seeing eye, who can’t imagine human foibles? “Shock and disgust,” she says. “My, my. I think I  _ have _ to hear it now.”

Thomas finally looks up at her, his eyes black holes, bedraggled hair making him look approximately sixteen. There is no color in his face at all; even his lips are bloodless with cold. He looks so puzzled that she does not think at all before putting an arm around his shoulders -- she can feel him shaking -- and drawing him back toward the door. “Come on,” she says, taking a fraction of his weight, and despite how tall and broad he is Thomas leans on her: if only a little, still a little. 

II

Bates has seen men in despair more than once, over the course of his various careers. Has been one himself. There is a very clear sensation of  _ familiarity, _ looking at Barrow now, and although he would gladly have kicked the little bastard down the stairs this time yesterday he is conscious of a vast and grudging fellow-feeling. 

It’s partly the hair, he thinks. Barrow is vain of his hair -- of his everything -- and the slickly oiled and combed neatness of it does not go at all with the blank, miserable expression on the face beneath. It’s jarring, incorrect. 

“Prison has changed you,” Barrow says, his voice faint and without much emotion. He isn’t looking at Bates; isn’t looking at anything, really, sitting on his narrow bed in his shirtsleeves with the thousand-yard stare of someone who has received a mortal wound and is waiting for the pain. His eyes are red-rimmed, but there are no tears now; perhaps he has run out of them. “There was a time when nothing was too bad for me, as far as you were concerned.”

“Prison has changed me,” he says, because it’s true. “You do know Miss O’Brien is behind it?”

Barrow gives a tiny shrug. “I knew someone was. Jimmy’d never think of it for himself.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that she’ll get away with it?”

“Not really.” The tone is not exactly light and inconsequential: it is simply blank. Dissociative.

Bates pushes harder. Wanting a response. “Without a reference after ten years here? You’ll never work again.”

“Not in England. But elsewhere maybe. A cousin in Bombay. I might go there. I like the sun.” 

He wants to take Barrow by the shoulders and shake him. “There must be  _ something _ you know about Miss O’Brien you can use against her.” Bates doesn’t like this twerp one little bit, but he dislikes O’Brien  _ more, _ and there is injustice here of a sort that he cannot ignore. If Barrow is to go down it should be on the merit of his performance at his job, not because of some nasty spiteful little conspiracy between a scheming maid and an idiot prettyboy footman.

Barrow finally looks up at him, his pupils gaping: all but a thin pale ring of green is eaten up with black. There are faint smudges of color high on each sharp cheekbone, bright against the stark pallor; he looks  _ ill. _ “You’ve heard of the phrase  _ to know when you’re beaten? _ ” he says, softly. “Well, I’m beaten, Mr. Bates. I’m well and truly beaten.”

“Then give me the weapon,” says Bates, “and I’ll do the work. What can I say that will make her change her mind?”

For the rest of his days he will not be able to forget the change in Barrow’s expression: out of that blank misery a kind of dawning  _ surprise, _ rising like the day, a heartbreaking confusion giving way to something like a faint and terrible hope. He thinks  _ has no one in his life ever shown him the slightest bit of kindness or understanding, _ and just as clearly knows the answer -- and what had begun as an impulse solidifies into determination. O’Brien will not win this one, if he has anything to say about the matter -- and there it will rest. Barrow owes him nothing for setting this tiny fragment of the universe back where it ought to be.

III

In the worst of the dreams he is back in London, in the electric reek of thunderstorms, strapped to the chair with the glass plates turning and the spark-gap snapping loudly enough to make him flinch even before the electrodes touched him and sent him  _ away _ in an instant of blue-lit pain. After the first of the treatments he had scarcely been able to walk, all his muscles sore and strengthless, and when he had finally reached his lodgings he had had -- humiliatingly -- to crawl up the stairs. Lying on the narrow bed under the eaves he had wondered if he could bear it, and if it was  _ worth  _ trying to bear -- but hard on the heels of that thought had come cold certainty. 

_ Oh I would give anything to be free of this. I would give anything, anything, anything at all. _

Even with his eyes closed the tears had slipped down his cheeks, one after another, to wet the silent cups of his ears.

It had grown slightly easier, after that. Knowing what to expect helped a little. But he could not sleep, and the pills and injections made him so sick he could not eat, and when the course of treatment ended and he was sent away with a small wooden box containing more of the precious substances he tried not to flinch away from the expressions of the people he met on the journey north,  _ knowing _ what he looked like.  _ Brass it out, _ he’d told himself, on the walk up to the house.  _ Brass it out, Thomas, _ and he had, and he has  _ been _ brassing it out, and oh God he hurts so  _ much _ \--

Giving himself the injections had been bad to start with, and now it is no longer bad, or even terrible, it is  _ unspeakable _ and he does it anyway because he has come this far, giving up now is inconceivable, he’s sunk so much time and money into this -- only he is dizzy all the time, his head singing with fever, and the swelling at the injection site is getting worse every day and he has had to  _ hide it  _ from everyone under vicious, snarling rudeness and he is growing more and more afraid that he will do something unforgivable like drop a decanter or simply faint dead away in front of the family -- Baxter knows something’s wrong, she’d caught him once with the syringe but he thinks she doesn’t know what he’s doing with it -- 

(In the middle of the night, when he is lying face-down on the bed and trying to ignore the pain enough to sleep, knowing that he will be torn out of it by nightmares of London, he has thought more than once of how vast a relief it would be simply to go to her and ask for help, to hand all of this to Baxter and have it not be his problem anymore, to give up and give in -- and he is not quite there yet. Not quite. But almost. He thinks of Mrs. Hughes that night in the rain, letting him lean on her without a single question, and shies away from the thought of telling  _ her: _ he would die first, gladly. But Baxter -- well. Maybe.)

Or maybe he  _ will _ simply die, Thomas thinks, wracked with shivering. Maybe it would be for the best, really. An unavoidable inconvenience to the staff, but they’d get over it. 

The tears, when they come, soak his pillow as they have done almost every night. Crying hurts but he can’t help doing it anyway, soundless and shaking, and -- still crying -- drifts off. In the dream that comes to him he is not in London at all, but at Downton, downstairs in the servants’ hall, every plane and angle subtly wrong as if seen in a funhouse mirror, and at the table -- as if they belong there -- are dead people. Matthew Crawley, William Mason, that Turkish fellow, people Thomas had known in the war and seen blown up right in front of him, all of them turn to stare at him, maggots squirming in the dark hollows where their eyes ought to be. In the dream he cannot move, is rooted to the spot as the dead look him up and down with undisguised disdain -- he thinks  _ oh God I don’t even belong here, is there nowhere I can be _ \-- and when he wakes with his screams mercifully muffled in the pillow the echoes of Matthew’s voice, clotted with earth, are still ringing in his ears. 

_ Get up while you still can, you stupid man, and go to your friend -- she’s not your friend, but she’s the closest thing you have -- and hope that she is kind enough to help. _

IV

Phyllis Baxter knows what it is like to keep a secret -- hers, or somebody else’s -- and what it is like to give that secret away. How awful and how vast a relief, all at once, like lancing a wound, like vomiting up something that’s poisoned you, getting it  _ out, _ making it a thing that exists in the world rather than in your own heart and mind. Baxter knows all this, and yet it is still something of a surprise when Thomas Barrow breaks in front of her. 

She has wondered over the past few days whether he is simply going to collapse before whatever is wrong with him can be addressed. He’s very clearly running a fever, beyond pale into  _ grey _ and sheened with sweat, vivid brushes of color high on each patrician cheekbone, the shadows under his eyes cruel and bruised. She’s seen him have to pause and steady himself by hanging on to the banister or bracing against the wall, eyes shut, and with a kind of anguish  _ knows _ that there is not a goddamn thing anyone can say to convince him to give it up; that he must do on his own, because he is the most pig-stubborn idiot she has ever encountered, and --

“Could I talk with you, please?” he says, faultlessly polite despite how shocking he looks, and she stares up at him and thinks  _ oh God is it too late _ \-- only for a moment, and then she is once more smoothly in control. She draws him into the bathroom, locks the door behind them. “I’m sorry about this,” he says, sounding distant, not looking at her, and begins to unfasten his trousers, and Baxter has an unsteady faintly hysterical instant of thinking  _ half the kitchenmaids in this house would give their right arm to be here right now. _ Or they would, before he came down with whatever-this-is.

“Go on,” she says, steadily. “I can take it,” and then he has half-turned, pulling up the tail of his shirt to expose an angry red swelling just at the top of his hip. It’s the size of a baby’s fist. “God in heaven,” she murmurs despite herself -- no  _ wonder _ he’s feverish. 

Thomas winces, still looking at the floor as he tucks his shirt back in. When he speaks his voice is still distant, almost disinterested, and Baxter thinks  _ this must be worse than the pain, for him, this moment must be unbearable.  _ “I thought it would pass,” he says, “but it just keeps getting worse. I can’t sleep.”

“I'm not surprised,” she says, aching, and he makes it worse.

“Help me,” he says simply, and now he  _ is _ looking at her, desperation in his eyes. “You were always asking if I need help. Well, now’s your chance. I don’t know what to do.”

_ She _ does. Baxter is good at making decisions very quickly, not that this one is much of a logical stretch -- she knows why he hasn’t done it already, but there is no longer any choice. “We’re going to the doctor,” she says briskly,  _ "now, _ and we’ll show him the syringe, and the liquid you injected, all the pills you’ve been taking, all of it. Follow me down in five minutes, and we’ll meet by the backdoor, and bring everything with you - do you understand?”

There is almost relief in his face, but he leans against the door before she can open it, looking down again at the floor-tiles. “I’ve...done something that I shouldn’t have,” he chokes out. “And...if you knew what it was, you wouldn’t  _ want _ to be part of this.”

If he weren’t so ill Baxter would have taken him by the shoulders and shaken him firmly for thirty kinds of an idiot. She’d  _ seen _ the advertisement in that magazine, and she isn’t a natural-born fool, whatever Thomas may think. “I know what it was,” she tells him firmly, and he gives her a miserable look that  _ does _ start to dawn into relief. 

The journey down to the cottage hospital is not one which she wishes to recall with any detail. Nor is the conversation they have with Dr. Clarkson: Thomas is clearly  _ making _ himself speak, grinding out the words in a kind of awful, vicious confessional, and Baxter is more grateful than she can express for the brisk sympathy Clarkson demonstrates. And glad, too, when he sends her out to the waiting-room; she has no desire to witness what has to happen next. 

Once she’s there, though, she can’t stop her mind dwelling on the whole bloody mess of a situation. That Thomas should have hated what he is so much he’d put himself through this intense physical misery in the hopes of changing it is -- shocking, in a way. She had had no idea quite how much self-loathing was hidden underneath that polished, sarcastic, scheming exterior; if anything she would have said that he was too full of himself. Sitting in the waiting room with her eyes shut, she remembers all the awful little conversations they’d had while he held her own shameful secret hostage against her continued role as his spy; remembers vividly wishing that something would happen to him, if only to make him leave her alone. 

_ Something did happen to him, _ she thinks.  _ Something’s happened to him all his life. _

He’d run into Lady Edith’s burning bedroom to rescue her. 

He’d survived the war. 

He’d endured weeks of fever and pain for -- a useless goal, but one he’d believed in, wanted so much he had thought it was worth it. 

She is still thinking about that when the nurse comes to fetch her. 

V

It had hurt enormously, what Clarkson had done, but it had also been a relief; a different kind of pain than the hot red poisonous throb of before. Hearing that it would heal, that he hadn’t permanently damaged himself, was more of a relief, even if admitting out loud to the doctor what he’d done had been one of the most humiliating things he could remember; at least Clarkson had been kind rather than pitying, telling him the truth. He could not have borne pity, not then. 

_ Harsh reality is always better than false hope, _ the doctor had said. He wonders. 

Beside him Baxter is quiet, on the walk back. It’s the kind of quiet that treacherously inspires you to try to fill it. “Well,” he says, putting up the umbrella for them both as it comes on to rain again,  _ "that’ll _ give you a good laugh.” 

“It won’t,” she says. “And I don’t expect you to understand, but I think it shows you to be a very brave person.” 

He stares at her. “What?”

“To inflict such pain on yourself to achieve your goal,” she says. “Think what you could do in this world if you just set your mind to it.” 

Thomas can’t help laughing. It hurts, but everything hurts at the moment. “You’re daft, you know that?” he says, and she smiles at him, and he will hear  _ think what you could do in this world if you just set your mind to it _ over and over again at quiet moments for the rest of his life; and everything still hurts but just for right now, just briefly, he is aware of  _ not being alone. _


End file.
